


Mongrels

by Kana_Go



Series: Russian to English translations [7]
Category: Da Vinci's Demons
Genre: Gen, M/M, Slash-ish, Stream of Consciousness, Translation from Russian into English, warning: description of internal organs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-04 03:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14584182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kana_Go/pseuds/Kana_Go
Summary: Girolamo Riario is in the habit of calling Zo a mongrel. You are another, signore.





	Mongrels

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Псы](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/379716) by H. Z.. 



> Enormous thanks to the author for this story (the language is delicious!) and huge thanks to wonderful meridian_rose (meridianrose) for beta-reading!

Everything can be everything, and every minuscule particle of the Universe, on its own, already contains the whole world within.

That’s what Leo says.

Zo has no reason not to believe his friend… who would be a local idiot, a laughingstock for urchins and beggars if he didn’t happen to be a genius.   
Goodness knows how it works with those minuscule particles, but in the visible world everything really turns into everything else, into its resemblance or opposite if only you know how to look. That’s how a pomegranate blossoms – and bears a fruit, granulating and bursting with seeds of future grape-shots. That’s how a horse, stretching itself in midair, becomes a bird, and a bird becomes a woman; folds of a dress flow, sharp and soft like flight feathers, and an autopsied corpse’s tendons are stretched on its bones just like strings on the neck of a lute, and an inexpensive wench acquires the demeanor and pace of the Madonna, and numerous suns, shattering to pieces, fall onto the convex surface of an artist’s eyes which look closely and admiringly at the sky.    
…and all this, taken together and multiplied by midnight booze, _is_ Leo who drinks life greedily like multicolored wines, mixing them, and laughing, and spilling drops into his wide open shirt collar. He’s fun. Besides, he’s talented like good Lord himself.

Or maybe like a black magician who received from the Fiend the ability to change the world with a couple of touches.

(Zo believes in neither though he prefers preserving neutrality and keeping peace with both forces – who knows how it’s going to turn out in reality.)    
However, whatever they say about grandeur and saintdom of the Roman church reaching its white wings forth over the Italic lands patronizingly, it has very little to do with the Almighty and his balmy pastures of Heaven.

And Count Riario, who follows them closely, toe-to-toe, is a hellhound trained to smell fresh blood.    
The arrogant emissary of Rome – Count, what-else-he-is, Captain General, gonfalonier, stinker, venomous thing, dangerous beast – is surprisingly good-looking. He possesses that outrageous intricate handsomeness – fleeting, multiarticulate, insectile – which is pieced together from individual traits into a single coherent harmony. Into an elusive fire which scorches your eyes and wounds your very soul ‘til a deep unforgettable burn appears. From smithereens – into a stained-glass window.

As if something indistinct sparkles in the grass in the distance ‘til you bend over – a gold coin, a spit, a gem that fell out of a distracted nob’s finger-ring or just a piece of glass as cheap as a doxy who dropped it.

Get off your horse and kneel down to look closer.

(Become vulnerable.)    
The count – Riario, the papal hunting dog – screws up his well-shaped lips in an odd grimace, making a wry face, like a child who cannot figure it out yet if he’s going to laugh or cry.

He keeps quiet, he is like a riddle without a clue, a chest without a key.

We’ve dissected more secretive ones.     
“Mongrel,” the count insults him every time they see each other (or at least he thinks he does). It’s not like Zo looks forward to hearing his name said by this voice that sounds as if it got hoarse from howling at the moon, no, he’s totally able to live without such an honor.

But the count’s sick eyes the color of stale clotted blood keep following them – Leo! – and his silent intense attention is contemptuous and greedy at the same time.  It’s like being in an empty alley even without hearing any steps, turning around or catching a glimpse of someone’s silhouette yet, you can feel the cold of an unwinking stare on your back, the hairs on the nape of your neck prickling, and you realize: there’s going to be a fight.

The count calls him a dog. How come doesn’t he feel that his own neck is trapped by a strap of someone else’s will, by a choke-chain collar whose leash can be followed to Sixtus’s hand? How come doesn’t he sense that there is more than one dog here?    
Digging into the darkness of someone’s soul is another thing Zo can live perfectly without until he dies (he hopes it won’t happen anytime soon). Then why is this stare – intense, expectant, like a starving man’s one, even if it isn’t directed to Zo – similar to a thorn which cuts through both the sole of your boot and your skin when you step onto it full force?   
Numerous secrets are hidden under human ribs.

Lungs resemble two clusters of purple grapes – pressed to each other closely, bubbly berries which merge into two big bunches. Well, understandably if they are very fresh lungs, not that slippery muck that occupies the maestro’s table for three weeks.   
“…by the way, Leo, if that poor bastard’s liver stays here for a few more days, it’ll acquire the ability to crawl away all by itself, without waiting for you to deign to kick it out. You’ll have to charge it rent soon.”  
A human heart is a wondrous fruit, a fist-sized berry, dark purple flesh. The artist cracks a breathless sternum open like a casement window in the morning and releases not only the smell of rotting meat, but also knowledge in which, thank you Leo, not just sadness is hidden.    
(As for human bowels, they are not that poetic even if they look like tentacles of sea creatures filling fishmongers’ baskets… and stink like these, too.)  
So, coming back to a heart. Leo explains, waving his hands smeared with something dark and sticky in his usual creative ecstasy: the ancients wrote that the heart is in fact the focus of all thoughts and feelings while the brain’s duty is cooling blood during its circulation.

Leo doesn’t agree with it. A thought, he says, is born under a cranial vault, so why can’t a feeling originate there, too?

Strictly speaking, Zo doesn’t care… wouldn’t care, and he listens not just to be polite (he knows better than that!) or out of idle curiosity.

The thorn which has pierced the flesh of his own heart and broken at its base – unhealthy dark stare, angry and curious – is poisonous.    
Everything is a poison and everything is a medicine.   
…up close, face to face, at a distance of a finger span between their faces, the count doesn’t really look as angelically young as from a dozen steps. Barely noticeable, but there are wrinkles around his eyes, uneven skin.

(A hungry abyss gaping between his eyelids. Diabolic centuries-old weariness of one incarcerated in the Pit.)

And his bared white teeth under flakes of saliva foaming with rage – nothing but fangs, a serrated predator-like rim, a dog’s jagged stockade. Against which Zo, skinning his knuckles bloody, puts his fist with gusto. Leo won’t judge him. Probably.

(The resulting mark, semi-circle, girdling his whole hand, doesn’t clear up for a long time.)

It’s not so long ‘til the moment when in Incan caves Zo, forced by the count’s hand, will press his throat against a cold blade – less than a year and more than a lifetime, it seems.  

 

                                                                 


End file.
